Craft CMS Developer Benchmark Results 2022

We’re so pleased to have been able to conduct the Craft Benchmark survey again. This year we’ve had 297 respondents from 35 countries – up 22% and 6% from last year respectively.

2022 has been a big year for Craft, with the release of both Craft CMS 4 and Craft Commerce 4.

We did this benchmark to:

1. Give insight into the Craft CMS developer community
2. Give ideas on how to use Craft CMS better
3. Give ammunition for pitching Craft CMS to clients

We created this benchmark because:

1. We're Craft CMS developers
2. We believe the report will be helpful for the community
3. We wanted to learn and get better at what we do – and hope you do too

And just to clarify – we have no association with Craft CMS or Pixel & Tonic.

Who works with Craft CMS?

This section explores some aspects of who the Craft developer community is made of, covering business and demographics.

What describes you best?

Craft CMS tends to be used primarily by small agencies and freelancers, with 63% of respondents either working at or running an agency, and 23% being freelancers.

This is roughly the same as it was last year.

What size is your agency?

For those working at or owning an agency.

How many years of professional coding experience do you have?

Craft CMS developers tend to skew towards developers with more experience, rather than those just starting out.

How long have you been using Craft CMS?

Thanks for clarifying, Brandon 😉.

Basically yeah 🙃 pic.twitter.com/qdYZBAhMiT

— Brandon Kelly (@brandonkelly) October 11, 2022

Approximately how many Craft CMS projects have you worked on in total?

Are you a Craft partner?

You can become a Craft CMS Partner via the official site.

Demographics

Location

The largest groups of respondents are from the US or the UK – but the Craft community spreads all over the globe.

Including everyone makes this chart really long – but there are also representatives from Croatia, France, Hungary, Indonesia, Ireland, Romania, Algeria, Bangladesh, Costa Rica, Denmark, Finland, Greece, Israel, Japan, Jersey, New Zealand, Singapore, Slovakia, South Africa, Spain, Sweden, UAE and the Virgin Islands.

Age

Gender

A big jump up from last year for females, increasing from 3.1% to 14.8%. Why do you think this was?

What is built with Craft CMS?

Craft is an incredibly versatile tool, and we’ve definitely seen it pushed and pulled in a lot of directions to accommodate various business needs.

We wanted to know how Craft-focused the respondents are – whether they’ve gone all in on Craft, or whether Craft is one of several platforms used.

What types of websites do you build with Craft?

Many respondents mentioned “headless” or “API” sites in the custom responses.

What other CMS's have you developed for?

How many of your web projects were built in Craft?

Most respondents are building almost 100% of their sites with Craft, which is about the same as last year.

Around a quarter of people built a higher proportion of Craft CMS websites this year.

Of all the web projects you have worked on in the past 12 months – what percentage of them used Craft CMS?

How did this compare to the number of Craft CMS projects you worked on in the previous 12 months?

What CMS is your agency / personal website built on?

Good to see that most agencies are building their own websites with Craft, with 69% of respondents doing so. It’s quite surprising to see 15% use no CMS at all. Not so surprising is 5% still hanging on to their old Wordpress site.

Many of the “other” responses noted their own websites were built with Sanity.

Your Craft CMS Setup

This section explores the various ways developers use Craft, covering how they kick off a new project, what database technology they use, and various other decisions.

Your development environment

Most developers use an Apple Mac.

What browser do you primarily develop Craft CMS websites in?

Most developers use Chrome.

What IDE / code editor do you use for Craft CMS development?

Most developers use VSCode, followed by PHP Storm.

The only answer given for the custom editor is Nova.

A whopping 4 respondents use Notepad++.

What local environment software do you use for developing Craft CMS projects?

Most developers are now using DDEV – with 15% still using Nitro despite it being EOL.

RIP Nitro 🪦

What local environment tool do you use for working with databases on Craft CMS projects?

The most popular SQL software are:

• TablePlus
• Sequel Ace has overtaken Sequel Pro
• PHPMyAdmin

Your Craft CMS set up

When starting a project how do you download Craft CMS?

9/10 users start their build process with Composer. Many of the custom answers mentioned a boilerplate repo, which may well also use Composer too.

Do you use a Craft CMS 'boilerplate' for starting new projects?

72% of respondents use some sort of starter repo, with 67% of them rolling their own code and 5% using an existing boilerplate.

28% of users start from scratch each time. Mentalists.

Of the 5% who clone an existing starter repo, here are the most popular:

• NyStudio107 (6 mentions)
• jmcgaha/craft-boilerplate (2 mentions)
• One Darnley Road (3 mentions)

How do you run the Craft CMS Setup Wizard?

What database option do you use for Craft CMS projects?

Less than 10% have adopted Postgresql.

MySQL is the favourite with MariaDB a close second.

Project Config

Do you use Craft CMS's Project Config?

Almost 90% of respondents use the project configuration either all the time or most of the time.

We think it’s one of Craft’s best-selling points and couldn’t imagine #devlife without it.

Of the people who don’t use it, we’d love to know why. Maybe we’ll put that in the questionnaire next year.

Do you allow config admin changes on production?

The Project Config works best when clients can’t make changes on production, so it makes sense that there’s a strong correlation here about permissions.

Frontend technology

What frontend Javascript libraries / frameworks / tools do you typically use with Craft CMS?

Since our 2021 survey, we’ve added Alpine and Svelte to the options for this question.

Alpine was the horse to back, coming in at second place behind vanilla JS.

Svelte didn’t quite have the pickup coming in at only 8th place. Vue and React have stayed about the same usage since last year.

2022

2021

What frontend CSS frameworks do you typically use with Craft CMS?

The CSS framework results are almost identical to last year, with 69% of developers using Tailwind.

We've adopted Tailwind and love it.

Down slightly from last year (43.2%) – but we're still staggered by the number of developers choosing to roll their own CSS (39.4%).

2022

2021

Techniques and choices

This section is all about the choices developers make when building their web projects.

Where do you define Craft CMS Routes?

Many people noted that they don’t need to define custom routes, as Craft’s native section routing does everything they need.

We’ll be sure to make that an option next year.

Where do you define Image Transforms?

A common theme in the custom responses is that many people define transforms in their own custom configuration, module, or macro.

At Honcho, we use a config object defined in a JSON file.

What plugins do you use for Image Transforms?

The most popular plugins for image transforms are

• Imager X (11 mentions)
• ImageOptimize (13 mentions)
• Image Resizer (1 mention)
• Imgix (1 mention)

Clients

This section covers how developers work with the clients, in terms of creating the best experience for them, and contracts.

Do you give your clients' full Admin accounts?

Most people here opt for never or occasionally, clearly erring on the side of caution.

Do you customise the Entry column views in the Craft CMS Admin?

Craft CMS allows you to customise which columns are displayed in which entry sections in the CMS, to only show the relevant data to your clients.

We love this feature and apparently so do most respondents.

Do you add your client's logo to the Craft CMS Admin Login page?

We find a nice way to make a web project feel polished is to add the client’s logo to the login screen.

How do you update Craft CMS?

Only 2 of you are on Santa's naughty list this year.

Use of Craft’s features

This section covers some of Craft’s most popular features and takes a look at how some of Craft 4’s features have been adopted.

Have you updated a website to Craft 4?

70% of users have updated a site to Craft 4, and it sounds like it was mostly pretty smooth sailing.

Nobody gave the upgrade process less than 2 out of 10, with most giving 7 or above.

Out of 10, how smoothly did it go?

Have you built in Craft 4 from a fresh install rather than upgrading?

82% of users have also created a new Craft 4 project from scratch

The most loved features of Craft 4 are:

• Conditional Fields
• PHP 8 support 💪
• CP Performance
• Collections

Shiney new Craft 4 stuff aside, most people’s favourite features of Craft are:

• Twig
• Content Modelling
• Developer Experience
• Matrix

The use of Twig is something that we immediately fell in love with, moving from inline PHP in WordPress.

The templates are loads cleaner and more maintainable.

The powerful native content modelling and matrix are also reasons we’ve never looked back.

Are there any Craft CMS core features you've not used yet?

• GraphQL API / Headless Mode
• Developer Support Services
• Tags
• One-Click Updating

Have you ever used Craft CMS's GraphQL API?

Have you ever used Craft CMS as a 'headless' CMS?

Craft CMS plugins

We wanted to find out a bit about how Craft developers use plugins.

It was interesting for us to discover some plugins we’d not heard of, as well as see some popular favourites like SEOmatic and Blitz.

What Craft CMS Plugins do you always use when starting a new project?

This gives some interesting insight into what plugins developers feel are an essential part of any web project.

The most popular plugins that tend to be in developer’s starter repos are:

1. SEOmatic, by NYStudio107
2. Super Table, by Verbb
3. Typed Link Field, by Sebastian Lenz
4. Neo, by Spicy Web
5. Retour, by NYStudio107
6. Imager X, by Space Cat Ninja
7. Navigation, by Verbb
8. Vite, by NYStudio107
9. Formie, by Verbb
10. Sprig, by PutYourLightsOn

Most popular Craft plugin developers

We looked at all of the plugins mentioned in the above question, and here are the developers that other developers depend on the most.

Most popular starter plugins by Category

SEO Plugins

Plugins that handle all of your SEO needs.

1. SEOmatic by NYStudio107
2. SEO by Ether Creative
3. SEOMate by Værsågod

Matrix Alternatives Plugins

Though Craft’s native Matrix field is very powerful and very useful, there have been a few attempts to rework the way content is handled and solve the question of matrix inception. Here are the most popular alternatives.

1. Super Table by Verbb (82 mentions)
2. Neo by Spicy Web (39 mentions)
3. Vizy by Verbb (4 mentions)

Link Fields Plugins

A field type that handles different types of links is a great addition to Craft.

1. Typed Link Field by Sebastian Lenz (63 mentions)
2. Linkit by Pressed Digital (15 mentions)

404 and Redirect Plugins

Instead of managing redirects in your server configuration, a few plugins exist that can handle this and also log 404s.

1. Retour by NYStudio107 (39 mentions)
2. Redirect Manager by Dophiq (6 mentions)

Form Builder Plugins

1. Formie by Verbb
2. Freeform by Solspace
3. Express Forms by Solspace
4. Wheel Form by Wheel Interactive

Image Optimisation Plugins

1. Imager X by SpaceCatNinja
2. Image Optimize by NYStudio107

Have you ever written a Craft CMS plugin or custom module?

Around 76% of developers have written their own plugin, but only 31% have shared it with the world.

This is roughly the same as the 2021 results.

Do you have a plugin published on the Craft CMS Plugin Store?

Craft Commerce

Craft Commerce is first-party eCommerce plugin for Craft CMS.

Have you worked with Craft Commerce?

What other E-Commerce platforms have you tried?

If you didn't use Craft Commerce, what would you use?

Shopify is the favourite backup option if Craft Commerce is not available.

Why did you choose Craft Commerce?

What could Craft Commerce do better?

Services, SASS and Hosting

In this section, we’ll look at the results around what external services and tools our respondents use.

Where do you usually host your Craft CMS project repo?

Where do you host your clients' Craft CMS sites?

Where do you host your Craft CMS site Asset volumes?

It’s pretty even for images being stored locally or on an AWS S3.

There’s a slight increase in using external services, with local web server storage dropping around 10% since last year.

Business time

Here we’ll look at the internal operations of the respondents, relating to contracts and pricing.

What's the average price for one of your Craft CMS websites?

The average price of a site is fairly wide, which is to be expected given Craft’s versatility.

How often do you run maintenance on your clients' Craft CMS sites?

Another 6 to add to the naughty list.

What percentage of your client's Craft CMS sites are on maintenance contracts?

How do you train your clients' to use Craft CMS?

How do you find selling Craft CMS to clients?

How do you handle Craft CMS and Plugin licence fees?

Client feedback

At the end of the day the client is the one who’s going to benefit from all that Craft has to offer, so we felt it was important to get some data about this.

What are your clients' general feelings towards using Craft CMS?

From your clients' feedback what would you say are their top 3 features of Craft CMS?

How do your clients generally find the Craft CMS content authoring experience?

Learning Craft CMS

What resources do Craft CMS Developers use to learn and get support?

What resources do you use to learn Craft CMS?

Incredible that NYStudio107’s blog is a more popular resource than the Craft CMS Stack Exchange – great work Andrew!

What do you think of the Official Craft CMS Documentation?

Where's your first port of call when you need Craft CMS support?

Have you used the free Craft CMS Developer Support Services support?

Have you used the paid Craft CMS Developer Support Services support?

Have you ever attended a Craft CMS Meetup?

Around a third of Craft CMS developers have attended a Meetup, and they’re spread all over the world, with Belgium and London the most attended.

Coolio! Which Meetups have you been to?

1. Craft CMS Meetup Belgium 17.4%
2. London & South East Craft CMS Meetup 14.1%
3. Berlin Craft CMS Meetup 9.8%
4. Craft CMS Nederland 7.6%
5. Charlotte Craft CMS Group 6.5%
6. Craft CMS Manchester 6.5%
7. New York Craft CMS Meetup 6.5%
8. Austin 5.4%
9. Melbourne Craft CMS Meetup 5.4%
10. CraftPDX 5.4%
11. Craft CMS Nederland 5.4%
12. Craft CMS Notts 3.3%
13. Craft CMS Oslo Meetup 3.3%
14. Seattle 2.2%
15. Zurich Craft CMS Meetup 2.2%
16. Leeds 1.1%
17. Perth 1.1%
18. The Hague 1.1%
19. Other 10.9%

Have you ever attended the Craft CMS Dot All Conference?

The official Craft CMS conference. Arriving in Barcelona in 2023. See you there 😎

Your views and feedback

We wanted to have a few free-for-all questions to get some opinions on aspects of Craft more generally.

Is there anything specific that you really like about Craft CMS?

What's one thing that you think could be improved about Craft CMS?

Is there anything specific that you do not like about Craft CMS?

What's one killer feature you wish Craft CMS had that it currently does not?

How confident do you feel in Craft CMS's security practices?

How likely are you to recommend Craft CMS to another developer / agency / business?

Any final thoughts about Craft CMS?